My blog has been sadly quiet for the past month, but I’m now ready to resume my blogging duties. Today I’ve just a got a brief announcement though: Shashin 1.1 is now available for download at wordpress.org. I’ve added the most requested feature – widgets. Shashin now has a widget available for each of its main functions (displaying single photos, album thumbnails, random photos, newest photos, and tables of thumbnails). And for those not using widgets, I simplified the code needed for adding Shashin to your sidebar manually.

I don’t use widgets myself – since my sidebar is just a thin sliver of nav elements across the top – but it was fun learning how they work. The widget admin forms are great because I can include things like a drop down menu listing the possible image sizes, so you don’t have to keep referring back to the FAQ. The one thing that struck me as weird while studying other widgets is that all the other widget authors seem to have something against including a submit button in their widget admin forms. That’s just bizarre and not user friendly at all – they’re just counting on you hitting “enter” after filling out the last field in form. It’s probably because the couple of tutorials that are out there have just a single text input field (where a submit button is arguably less important), so everyone just blindly followed them, even when making a longer form. I’m happy to say that my forms include nice, friendly submit buttons 🙂